


“Ellessé Veganis, Third Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [25]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Handmaidens, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Sacrificial ethics, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-25
Updated: 2007-10-25
Packaged: 2017-11-13 08:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is fifteen random but chronological moments from the life of Ellessé Veganis, who is, quite literally, the third handmaiden in the third training class of potential handmaidens chosen from among a large pool of applicants for the job for the newly elected Nabooian Queen Padmé Amidala. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Ellessé Veganis, Third Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Ellessé Veganis’ life, as she is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, for anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Ellessé Veganis’ eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, precisely, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Ellessé. **3.)** Readers might want to consider the fact that Ellessé, like a lot of native Nabooians, is fairly strong in the Force, but that she hasn’t received any training whatsoever to speak of and so has no real conscious control over that sensitivity to the Force. **4.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for original characters like Ellessé should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, please keep in mind that Ellessé is modeled on a teenaged Alexa Vega! And please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **5.)** Handmaidens often tend to pair off, as is the case here, with Ellessé Veganis and Anadé Boranys, a fellow handmaiden from the same training class (hence, the relationship label for original female characters and the underage warning). **6.)** Speaking of pairings, I've labeled this to indicate both Padmé Amidala's and Sabé's love for Obi-Wan, because, even though it may not be specifically mentioned in this character study piece, handmaid(en)s know so much about their sworn Lady that readers can be certain that Ellessé, like all of Amidala's other handmaid(en)s who knew him (or knew of him), would have surely known about both their Lady's and Sabé's love and high regard for Obi-Wan, just as they would have known about how much Amidala and Sabé love one another!
> 
>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!

**“Ellessé Veganis, Third Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”**

 

 **01.) Remember:** She can vaguely remember her mother as a warm, bright, lovely, and yet also very sad presence, if she concentrates very hard and casts her thoughts back just as far as her memories extend, but she cannot remember her father or her older sister at all, and most of her early childhood memories are of her grandparents and the (paternal) aunt who took her in after her grandparents died, and even those are a bit fuzzy, considering she was four when that happened and barely five when Auntie Myria died, so it’s not so surprising that she considers her foster family her true family, though occasionally she misses her grandparents and her aunt.

 **02.) Girl:** Her foster brothers (Taymore, Reis, Emonn, and Mitcha Larminta) have never treated her like a girl, so it is a bit of a shock when, halfway through her seventh year, her foster mother, Nyda, suddenly seems to remember that she is a girl and to not only decide that it’s time to make her over into a little woman but to decree that, since she is a young woman, she can no longer be allowed to essentially run wild (and unchaperoned) with her older brothers.

 **03.) Frivolous:** She loves her foster mother, truly, she does, but she is just _not_ cut out for the life of a frivolous little girl who can be shown off at parties: she likes to hunt, and to fence, and to go hiking and rock climbing, and to swim, and to shimmy her way up trees so she can look out over the land and pretend she is an explorer or the lone survivor of some ship that’s crash-landed on an unchartered world, not to simper and smile and make empty, polite, nonsensical conversation about the weather and dresses and baked goods and who is seeing whom or who would make a good match for whom, and loving to dance just isn’t quite enough of a reason to make her behave well enough at parties to seem something she so patently isn’t.

 **04.) Drastic:** She’s about ready to do something drastic, like just pack up her bags and run, by her ninth birthday, and it’s her youngest foster brother who actually gives her an honorable way out of all this girlish madness without her having to break ties with the family, by (somewhat impatiently) pointing out that she can always avoid the silly parties if she has a better excuse for skipping out on them than simply not wanting to attend, like serious schoolwork . . . especially if said schoolwork requires her to move part time or at least travel back and forth between home and school, like their eldest brothers do.

 **05.) School:** She’s always had an excellent memory but never particularly been too terribly fond of reading or of schoolwork (not when she could be out in the woods, _living_ , instead of holed up in the house with some deadly dull text), and so she’s shocked to discover that she actually likes this new educational regime (with its focus on drama, rhetoric, composition, and debate) and even more surprised to discover that she’s actually quite good at it, too.

 **06.) Appeal:** The more theatrical aspects of politics appeal to her – the bombast of speeches and the posturing, the way that certain combinations of stance and tone and charisma and appeal and word choice and gesture can sway the minds and hearts of a people and turn an otherwise perfectly sensible group of individuals into a thinly veiled mob – and so she decides, by the age of ten, that she’s found her true calling in life, as a professional speech writer and communications expert.

 **07.) Charisma:** She likes this girl who’s been nominated for the position of Princess of Theed – she has charisma in buckets and is smart and savvy as well as passionate about her beliefs – and she can so easily imagine this passionate young girl going on to get old King Veruna removed from office and becoming Queen of Naboo that she is more than a little bit surprised at how shocked so many people seem to be by the very same idea and, understandably, smug enough about her prediction, when Padmé is elected Queen and becomes Padmé Amidala, that she smiles gloatingly about it for at least a week.

 **08.) Legal:** She is technically old enough to be considered a legal adult and so should be able to apply for one of the handmaiden positions whether her foster parents really approve of the idea or not, but unfortunately the committee that receives and judges applications has made it fairly clear that they prefer to have either applicants without family or else with the express written consent of a family that will not be harmed by what amounts to the loss of one of its members (since handmaidens essentially swear off all family duties and responsibilities, when they agree to serve), and so she launches a campaign designed to win her foster mother (and father, too, though she’s primarily worried about Nyda, not Argise) over to the idea, taking care to stress the opportunities inherent for advancement (and, technically, even for a powerful marriage alliance, eventually) for one working in the royal court and her desire to help write speeches and design new laws rather than to act as any kind of soldier-guardian and/or living shield between the new Queen and any threatening dangers, so she won’t be automatically shut down on the assumption that this is just yet another dangerous scheme she’s dreamed up to try to give her poor foster mother more grey hairs.

 **09.) Good:** She looks rather like a skinnier, slightly more tanned, somewhat sharper featured version of the Queen, her scores are good, her foster parents have finally both consented to the idea of her applying to the handmaiden training program, and she is already becoming known, in political circles, for her ability to craft memorable, powerful speeches, so she considers her chances of acceptance good enough that she’s already mostly finished packing her things, by the time the comm call comes with an actual offer.

 **10.) Confidence:** With some more confidence, Dormé could easily become a Queen herself (just as Sabé, the Queen’s first and primary decoy, could have been and could still become a Queen, if she but loved Amidala a little less and had a bit more personal ambition), and it’s fairly obvious to Ellessé that Dormé is the most correct choice for a Queen’s decoy from their training class, so she decides to make it her own little personal mission, to craft Dormé into a more confident and capable young woman, to see if it might eventually be possible to convince her to run for office herself, sometime, after Amidala’s time in office is over with.

 **11.) Careful:** She’s not really prepared for there to be any truly bad individuals among the handmaiden trainees, so she’s not as careful as she should be, with Rosé, and it’s only after she’s been suckered into helping the girl with her work and given not friendship or a close and loving relationship in return but instead an oddly rough and hurried one-time tumble after a picnic involving fresh fruit and far too much wine that it occurs to her that she’s been used.

 **12.) Complication:** The Trade Federation’s rather aggressive and numerous droid forces are a complication that she neither wants nor needs, but she’s convinced that the Viceroy’s occupation will be a brief one, despite all of the droids involved (for surely the Republic’s Senate and the Judicials – not to mention the Jedi Order! – won’t stand for such an obviously illegal and patently unprovoked act of aggression against the elected leader and the democratic peoples of a sovereign member world, like Naboo!), and so she sets herself to the task of surviving the (surely temporary!) setback and seeing to it that Dormé does, too, so she can pick up the pieces of her plans where she left off and start working on her goal again when they’re finally gone and things have gone back to normal again.

 **13.) Better:** She is extremely vexed with the Queen and with Sabé both, for essentially ruining her plans for Dormé by making the girl the primary decoy for the Queen in Sabé’s stead, now that Sabé is going to be sent off to Coruscant to act as their interim Senator (since Palpatine of course cannot be Supreme Chancellor and Senator both at the same time and the people of Naboo have absolutely refused to allow that ridiculous “anti-alien” bigot, Janus Greejatus, to succeed Palpatine in the Galactic Senate), since Dormé deserves far better than to essentially be subsumed by the Queen’s shadow, in her not so very humble opinion, and so it takes all of the not inconsiderable wiles of Anadé (an extremely lovely, brave young girl from her training class with whom she became extremely close, when they were on the run from the Trade Federation and trying to erode the efforts of its Viceroy to consolidate a true base of governing power over their planet and people by organizing the people in a quiet but deadly serious rebellion against the invading interlopers, and with whom she often thinks she may actually be in love, though they haven’t ever spoken of the prospect, _per se_ ) to keep Ellessé from venting her displeasure on both of them in no uncertain terms.

 **14.) Guard:** A little over three years and a month after the ousting of the Trade Federation, Anadé is slain by a sniper while she is standing perimeter guard over Dormé in her guise as the Queen, and the heart and joy all go out of Ellessé and her life so completely that she finally knows (too late to do anything about it, alas!) that, yes, indeed, she had in fact been quite deeply in love with Anadé Boranys.

 **15.) Hand:** She only rarely performs guard duties for the Queen (being considered too important, for her writing abilities, to risk unnecessarily, in such a fashion), but the handmaidens are all on hand, when the Queen makes her speech accepting a nomination for a second term as monarch of Naboo, so she is there, too, when the shooting starts, and she is enough of a handmaiden (and, to be perfectly honest, sufficiently tired of her life, without Anadé there to share it with her) that she throws herself in between the rapidly firing blasters and their far too vulnerable Queen (even though it registers on her, in that brief moment between the eruption of danger and her reaction, that this Amidala seems just a little bit tall, for Padmé Naberrie) without even so much as a second’s thought of hesitation.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Clarification Note:** One of the reasons why my AU **Star Wars** series _**You Became to Me**_ is so entirely not even nearly complete has to do with the fact that I really started writing at the wrong end of the prequel trilogy for an AU (in my defense, though, when I started what became my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, which is over a million words long, I thought I was doing a sort of one-shot fix-it based on an idea I got for "fixing" RotS by changing something that happens very near the end of James Luceno's EU novel _Labyrinth of Evil_ , which is set immediately prior to RotS). One of these days, I fully intend to rectify that problem by going back and starting from the beginning, with an AU rewrite of TPM, which is why I took the time to do a character study sketch for a supporting character like Ellessé. She'll be showing up again, in a more prominent role, whenever I get around to that AU rewrite of TPM. Folks might want to keep that in mind when reading this, since technically this is spoilerish for an AU novel that I haven't gotten around to writing yet!


End file.
